But why? Just because the city has a veneer of "cool" to it doesn't make it any less capitalistic. Gentrification is a huge problem in Austin, renters spend 50% of their income on rent because of the absurd housing prices.

Like I'm sure on average Austinites support the strike more than other places, but a business in Austin is just as exploitative as a business in any other city.

A car or a way to get to a library. 15% of the US lives in a rural area meaning going to a library could be challenging

To be free in the hours when the library is open. Someone who works a 8-5 job would not be able to go except on the weekends and this isn't counting areas of smaller towns that have probably cut the hours of the library down.

So someone hoping to apply for jobs or college or other programs would have to spend some their very little free time to go to a library to get anything done.

I'm not trying to spin it, I'm trying to point out it's much simpler to reduce a chunk of the population and their concerns than to reach out to them. They've been misled by decades of race baiting policies pushed by both parties and by the continuation of the lie that capitalism is a meritocracy, which Trump and others have played right into.

Also, why do you keep calling them petty? Do you consider wealth inequality and wage stagnation petty?

What about the fact that some of these communities have been the hardest hit by automation/jobs moving to other countries? Do you really think people in these communities who have been beaten down by late stage capitalism are just sitting at home thinking, "Hmm, what can we do to piss off neoliberals?" Nah, they made a poorly informed gut decision, led astray by someone touting himself as a model of capitalism working for someone, someone who appears through the smoke and mirrors as "successful"?

Also a large group of them are racist, but that's a completely different issue.

Sergie’s book gives all these details that came out after the fall of the Soviet Union about all these people who had committed espionage who were executed, and the exact details of how that was done. We follow that to the letter in the show when Nina was executed. It was planned in a very specific way so the person who was going to be killed doesn’t know they were going to be killed, and it was done that way for humanitarian reasons — they didn’t want the person to suffer, to be spending all this time in a cell pondering their own pending execution. They wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible.

So I think knowing whether Avi was guilty before doing anything to her was important to the Soviets, more than it probably would matter to Americans or other countries (I have no clue what Canadians feel on the subject). That was something I found especially interesting, since as you pointed out, Philip and Elizabeth kill strangers who are in the wrong place or who get tangled up in their schemes. It is a truly fascinating show!

It seems like the cell was probably wired or someone was listening, especially since they set up Nina to get her to confess.

(Season 4 spoiler) The J's talked in the podcast a lot about how we assume that laws did not matter to the Soviets when it came to catching spies, but spoiler the way they handled it they actually considered what they were doing to be respectful. So this might be something cultural we (I'm assuming you're American, apologies if this isn't the case) don't understand.

For a majority of Southern rednecks (or for the ones I have met), they have a hard time seeing how voting Republican is against their interests because they accept or don't realize the intent of wealth inequality. I know it's said a lot here but I think the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" line to describe America's relationship with class is so crucial to understanding how poor people have trouble seeing the cyclical nature of poverty as something perpetuated by the bourgeoisie and not something innate to life.

And racism absolutely plays a role in it. The propaganda/Southern Strategy has twisted how people see poverty non-white/communities they don't know.

The point socialists would make is that if someone owns a company, they will always put the bottom line above workers' rights because it serves their interest and they are rewarded for it. So you can't have a benevolent corporation because it needs to pay less for employees to make profit. In socialism, this incentive to put profit ahead of employees is removed because the company would be collectively run by the workers.

These systems are fundamentally opposed to each other, so it really doesn't seem like they can function well at the same time.

I believe she dropped something off to someone suspected of espionage, but claimed it was for her boyfriend and she knew nothing about it. Nina was able to get to confess that she knew her boyfriend was spying, which makes her an accomplice.

I was mostly trying to make the point that those other reasons and the fact that John is a guy could make someone assume the narrator is the father. You're right about it sounding like a lullaby, I can imagine a parent playing guitar to try to keep the babies occupied.

The mention of crows and Louisiana Live Oak fit with the tone of darkness and the allusion to the OKC bombings. Also the crows arguing the "finer points of local politics" could point to the unabomber's anarchist political motivations.

I sort of took "pink and blue" to mean twins. The use of you doesn't explicitly mean one baby, as most people don't say y'all and definitely don't say y'all in a song.

I think it's easier to imagine the narrator as the father for a bunch of reasons: JD's vocals sort of set it up from the get go to anticipate a male perspective, The idea that a man would be more unprepared for parenthood is ingrained in our society, and the narrator feeding the babies bananas implies they can't or don't know what to feed 9 day old babies. However, I don't think this is enough to assume the narrator is the father.

Plenty of mothers have this same overwhelmed sense at the idea of raising a baby and plenty of mothers can't or don't breastfeed. Breastfeeding is very time consuming and can be difficult, especially if there were two babies.

From the line "but the roots reach down to where the bad people go" it could be possible to assume that the narrator/parent is pretty young or they are speaking to their babies in a baby voice. Young parents could explain the cardboard box for a cradle and that one could take care of the kids while the other one works. The narrator could be talking to the babies this way because they are cooped up in a house with only 9 day old babies to talk to and have less to do with one partner leaving.